Literrata

Sunday, February 10, 2019

This morning the mountain was completely enveloped in fog. It was a transcendental experience watching the lake emerge from the flat planes of the pewter mist, and the myriad possibilities of fog and light emerge and recombine minute by minute. I never grow tired of watching it. Why did I never find the time to seek out and observe such beauty? It fair takes my breath away. It seems I am channeling the master cloud painters Frangonard, Watteau and Turner—with the clouds posing like that.

Black/Elephant Mountain is made of Franciscan strata and pillow lava, volcanic extrusions from under the sea—a child of the San Andreas Fault. Meanwhile, down the valley, in the distance, I could hear the call of a flock of Canada geese on the move, and a cow bawling for her errant calf. The cacophany of wild geese grew nearer—They were accompanying a lone bicyclist, blithely unaware that the wild geese gods were overhead protecting him on that empty stretch of road. The redtail hawks are flying low, zoning in on the chickens that are digging for worms in the pasture. A flash of red against the green grass, and the intense yellow of mustard. Somewhere, just out of sight, the bald eagle is circling. Leaping bass make concentric coinage on the surface of the lake. Grebes bob on the ripples, tree swallows crochet the air. I may be living somewhat feral existence well out of my comfort zone, but I am doubly blessed when it comes to a matter of light and fog on a lake at dawn.

The bicyclist and his entourage of wild geese.
They followed him all the way around the lake.

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Photographer friend Jerry Downs posted a lovely photo of an orange spotted housecat sitting on a car hood enjoying a rare bit of sunshine in an otherwise rainy week. And of course someone had to go and spoil it all by stating how every outdoor cat was responsible for 500+ songbird deaths in North America. A bird and a half a day per cat? Do the math. Who comes up with this stuff?

To wit, I replied—The cat bird kill thing is somewhat inflated....that would be a bird and a half per day per cat. I don’t think so. Besides, not all free roaming house cats kill birds. In fact, most pet cats are clumsy lummoxes. Easy targets like mice run in front of their noses and they hardly know what to do with them. They’re not the ferocious hunters they’re cracked up to be. Besides the males (he’s orange, therefore, has an 80% chance of being male) rarely, if ever, hunt.

But when it comes to birds, people’s free range pet moggies are unfairly bearing the brunt—convenient scapegoats for bird deaths. Instead look to bird habitat loss, exposure to chemicals, fertilizers, insecticides, and collisions with man-made objects—from cell towers airplane engines to to cars to windows. Human impact is the real threat" to songbirds.

We’ve also systematically killed off most of the wild birds’ natural predators—from kestrels and hawks to bobcats to coyotes and wolves— which was never factored in on the annual estimated bird population death counts. That said, I’m not for vast colonies of feral cats. They don’t belong here. They should be eradicated. But when someone’s pet moggie sitting outside on a car hood enjoying a spot of sunshine, being held responsible by proxy for massive bird deaths, is a bit over the top. Talk about killjoy.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Jim Heynen posted a Facebook photo of the Fort Worden Centrum summer writing conference, from 1979. It was before my time there but the stories from that conference were still circulating in 1980 when Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Susan Abbott, Tobey Kaplan and I crashed the Writers Conference in 1980.

The photo evoked such memories. I wrote to Jim: Ah, Sam Hamill with his curly red mop (I have a photo of him from the 1980 conference), and Bob Hass as a longhair. Migod, Levertov, and Kumin. Robert Bly was born old? We were all reading Thomas McGrath’s Imaginary Letters during those years. A hero of mine. What a handsome man. Can’t believe Bly was a belligerent asshole to Tom (hahaha). Shocked! Simply shocked, I am. We heard about that embroglio when we attended in 1980. And something g about the baseball story with Levertov.... I don’t remember any of the details.

Tree Swenson and Kathleene K West. I miss her. Ever the chameleon—she said she reinvented herself every ten years. She was kind to me, got me on the Montana Poets in the schools roster. We reconnected on Facebook right before her death....I had no idea she was in such anguish. She sold me her old cellphone for $15 but never cashed the check—its name was Gravity. I deleted her pictures of New Mexico, thanked her for the phone, then I heard the news.

Jim Heynen replied: Mo, I guess Bly was actually quite good in his workshops, but he tormented McGrath during McGrath's reading by yelling from the audience, "Read the Tomasito poems! Read the Tomasito poems!" McGrath finally addressed him firmly with, "Patience, Robert. Patience."
At a social event, Bly insulted Levertov by telling her she was being too hard on people in her workshops. She started weeping and came to me, exclaiming "What a horrible man!" But Levertov had no tear ducts to shed the tears she was feeling--so her eyelids just bulged and got red. Another tidbit: Bob Hass was reluctant to come and teach a workshop because, he said, "I don't know how to do it." Then he did a great job. One exercise was having participants do an exact imitation of a poem they liked--the same number of syllables per line, and accented and unaccented syllables exactly as the original.

I told Jim, thanks for the backstory. I was standing with Tess Gallagher and Ray Carver, as they, and others were recounting the stories, which became interwoven with ours...a mythos of sorts.

I only remember vague fragments of the infamous Levertov story of baseball players, drunken writers conference parties and the dropping of the f-bomb. And something about Kumin too that made the gossip train too. The stories that survived.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!

I am painfully reminded of all the cool places in Wales to visit, my ex partner’s sister dragged us to the fake village where The Prisoner was filmed. I was fit to be tied and asked W H Y with many question marks. We were there for six hours—it was truly a life sentence. The unanswerable questions arise. Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Last night’s storm pounded
like a desperate drunk at the door,
and left potholes the size of Shetland ponies.
The Laguna leapt its banks,
and kayaks decorate the new shoreline,
a vast inland sea, a river road
drowning the oaks,
leaving cattle stranded on new islands.
I saw ravens bathing in temporary lakes
in the horse pastures.
Trees and garbage bins bowed
to the untamed gods of wind and rain
while the earth shakes its mantle
like a wet dog at the fire.
They say last night Mary Oliver died.
Today is the anniversary of my former love,
John Oliver Simon’s death. Goodnight sweet prince,
The magic realm of a year and a day
is greeted by bales of hay sprouting green crewcuts,
and fields of young mustard is nodding
their golden mantles to the returning sun.

Inspired by a desire to capture “impressions” of everyday life, avant-garde French artists, whose work was considered unacademic by the Salon, changed the face of art—from upholding the neoclassic ideal (think photo-realism) to focusing on the vagaries of weather and intimate life by using a bright palette, and quick, broad impressionistic brush strokes.

The French impressionist movement of 1874 was controversial because the subject matter was not Salon approved—no allegorical subject matter. It did not instruct. it was art for art’s sake, or rather, it found god in the sublime.

And instead of painting in isolated studios, they took it outside, to the fields, thanks to pioneer landscape painter, Papa Corot. Also, the invention of tube paint changed how painters painted—in plein aire.

By the turn of the century, however, Impressionism was widely embraced, with artists making pilgrimages to study with Paris’ finest painters.

The movement was embraced by California artists who also emulated 19th-century French landscapes for inspiration. Society of Six, William Keith. Maurice LeMue. Unlike east coast impressionism, California Impressionist works did not solely revolve around the vagaries of weather, or the grandeur of sublime landscapes (think Bierstadt) instead, they showcased the atmosphere and emotion of scenery—using lots of juxtaposed color swaths.

Impressionism and the California Impressionism school has certainly affected my own sense of art. We grew up with a WPA mural in the Lagunitas school office, which was later discovered to be a mural by Maurice LeMue. It became an unconscious reference when I began to photograph landscapes. So, I owe my vision, in part, to that school.

(Well, I found the article I was reading to be so clumsily written that I wound up rewriting it, so no quotes. So I guess this is now my writing. But there is art!) See the link here. From a Facebook post. Perhaps I will expand it into a full article in the future.

Saturday, January 5, 2019

I’m not liking this new year at all.
I’ve been sneezing so hard it feels like
I’ve blasted myself backwards into yesteryear.
And all I want to do is to curl up
tighter than a tortured hedgehog
& sleep in until tomorrow,
and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Monday, December 31, 2018

I have fewer posts for 2018, than for previous years. But despite several major life-altering derailments, I managed to eke out some 60 poem entries (my goal is 52 posts a year)—a post a week) some poems are repetitions, or rather, revisions from April Poetry Month posts. I did very little by way of pulp fiction reading for my Amazon Reviews writing. The thrill is gone. No time or inclination to read, sadly.

My old boyfriend John Oliver Simon died in January, that left a deeper hole than expected. I also had to jump into the fray and manage his two California Arts Council grants, and there was little money to pay for my time as the majority of the funds were tied up in residencies. So I was poor as a churchmouse most of the year, with the CAC money tied up in knots. Then, the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, ended it—after 20 years. Just like that. I’m still reeling from that one.

So, I’ve been living rough on people’s couches. No fixed abode. Which also means no fixed job. No income. I’ve been living thin. I had to give away most of my possessions. I still need to rehome my books and art supplies. So, keeping up appearances has not been on the list. I wouldn’t wish that kind of year upon anyone. So, 2019 will be my year of massive change.

On the blog timeline front, I’ve managed to add a few old bits from those lean years. But it’s been slim pickings. I picked up a few posts in 1980, 1982; 1997, 1998, 1999; 200, 2004, 2005, 2006. But I still haven’t reached the magical formula of 52 posts a year on those lean years.

However, I did manage to pick up a few post entries—mainly reading posters—for those early years when I created the Russian River Writers’ Guild blog (a big scanning project—still not finished, but the bulk of it is done.) Most of the RRWG memorabilia was buried within this blog, so I’m pleased that the extended RRWG memorabilia is now a different entity. I also began scanning work for Herman Berlandt’s memorial blog as well, but it’s under construction (not posted).

If I ever am able to gather up my old pottery and ceramics pieces from the 1970s, and take photos of them, that’s on the back burner to add to this blog.But it’s extremely difficult for me to return to Oakland to get the rest of my stuff—let alone, my mail. Besides, I have nowhere to put the rest of my stuff. My books, art supplies and plants, especially.

I don’t have it in me this year to do a deeper Bill Jamesian-detailed statistics spreadsheet on my writing progress. Perhaps another time when I’m better dressed, emotionally speaking.

For some reason an unknown twat named Susan sent me a comment, not once, not twice, but thrice stating it’s my karma. Of course, I marked them as spam. She has no other posts, no other comments, not even a blog. Why would people even do such a hateful thing?

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Equivalencies. My mind is a bit like like Swiss cheese, full of holes when it comes to languages. I took the equivalent of two years modern Irish at UC Berkeley one summer, nearly 20 years ago, but I bottomed out in July, as my learning button broke. My head no longer worked, and the thing is, I’m usually pretty good at picking up languages. Possibly the toughest course I ever took was modern Irish. Bar none.

Our Irish teachers, Joe Nugent and Breen Conchubhair were pushing us so hard that many of us lost the thread. I gave up somewhere around the cupula. The class was supposed to be the equivalent of one year of Irish crammed into an intensive summer course. They opted to give us the equivalent of second year Irish, too—and my head broke. I couldn’t absorb any more. I’ve never had that experience before.

I later took a year of Archaic/Old Irish in order to translate the medieval Irish epics (it was all bookwork), alas, I still can't read Irish—other than to recognize words and occasional phrases here and there. People from Ireland assure me that I still know more Irish than they do....

Sometimes foreign words arise unbidden, I’ve no idea where they come from. Or even what language. It’s all a mystery how we acquire language. I mean, it’s all nice and textbook and ordered in a classroom—but that’s not how we acquire language. You have to create memories. It’s messy. You know, like go down to the pub and raise a jar or two. Get stinking blind drunk. That’s when my Russian comes back. Chut-chut.

However, I can swear profusely (and rather inventively) in several living languages, and a few dead languages. When I combined the words sabaca/dog and pizdah/cunt in a spontaneous invective, let's just say I brought the Russian house down. I lived one summer in Switzerland, I didn’t pick up much Switzerdeutsch, but let me tell you, I could swear like a troll of the highest arcana with a mere handful of words.

I also studied a semester of medieval Welsh, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I was completely ADD as it was during the 9/11 crisis. We were all out to lunch—as it were. I remember that we held class outside on the DOE library steps at UC Berkeley because the building was shut down... So surreal.

Medieval Welsh is much easier to learn than Irish, no doubt. But there's not that much crossover with learning Irish. Brythonic vs. Goidelic. And of course all the extra "vowel" types and double consonants are maddening. But I can do a pretty good hll sound, as in Llewelyn.

Even Russian is easier to learn than Irish. I remember looking longingly into the other classrooms, that summer at UC Berkeley, where other students were learning easy languages like Spanish, Latin, and Russian, and it seemed like the students were all wearing PJs and comfortable slippers by comparison. I could understand what they were saying with little effort, just by standing in the doorways like a demented peeping Tom.

Learning Irish is hard, very hard. At least they don't conjugate prepositions in Russian. I mean—prepositions fergawdsakes. I get conjugating verbs and nouns.What kind of language needs that kind of precision that directional words need to identify who is speaking? And what direction is involved? Just never attempt to explain going up or down stairs in Irish. Just don’t.

I lived in the USSR for a while during 1989 to 1991, so I had to pick up Russian fast. Talk about total immersion. If I wanted anything I had to learn how to ask for it. Food. Beer. Necessities. Black market. Also, when I was traveling illegally to Leningrad, I had to watch my Ps and Qs. Everyone thought I was from Kazakhstan or somewhere exotic. I was labeled “ethnic. And I’m ethnically Irish, that’s as close as it gets.

Though I heard Ukrainian spoken often enough, I was living in Cherkassy, near Kiev for a while, I never picked it up. Like with Dutch, Ukrainian just didn’t stick. Ukrainian is sort of like Welsh with all those extra vowel-y things running amok and creating havoc with your eyes.

I lived in Amsterdam on and off during the early 1990s , and because everybody in the Netherlands either bi-, or tri-lingual, not counting several dialects. However, they all spoke to me in English. Whether language, or dialect, the Dutch seamlessly code-switch between linguas francas. It’s kind of fascinating, really watching the Dutch effortlessly slide through the indo-European continuum.

I regret to report that I was lazy, that I merely learned the usual sound bytes, but not the language. Hooey Dag, bedankt, dank u wel, and alstublieft. And place names. I can even say Scheveningen perfectly. I’d never be mistaken for a German spy.

Weirdly, I can mostly make out the meaning in Dutch, if it’s in print. Ditto that with Latin. Church Latin, that is. I never studied Latin. Just 15 years of church Latin. Ecum spiri tutu o. I barely studied Spanish either but at least I’m fluent in Spanish—unless I panic. Then it’s curtains.

You should've seen me in Portugal right after 9/11. I was waving my arms like helicopter blades trying to achieve liftoff as I spoke a a bastard Portuguese-Spanglish to the taxi drivers. Everyone thought I was Italian. The only Italian I picked up was when I was a child living among immigrant families. Random words. Food.

But in Portugal, it really was a matter of survival. We didn’t want anyone to know we were American for fear of reprocussion. So my cousin and aunt were schtum/mum while I was gibbering on like a polyglotted gibbon while waving my arms as if to take flight—to the taxi drivers who didn't know what to make of us. I was negotiating the equivalencies between languages to create a pidgin dialect of survival.

Monday, December 24, 2018

An otherwise lovely story on apples in The Guardian that appeared last May, claimed that apples came from Kazakhistan. My immediate knee-jerk reaction was that the statement was wrong on so many levels.

I agree we need to protect Kazakhstani apples. But the sentence should
have read: "modern apples." And the more I delved into that sentence, the more wrong it seemed. My second thought was: What were the Romans doing in Kazakhstan, anyway? Did I miss that history lesson? And what about the native apples of Asia? Merely hearsay?

Despite
popular belief, wild apples were already in the British Isles long before the Romans arrived
(they just brought bigger apples). Circa 98 AD, Roman historian Gaius Tacitus reported that the Briton Druid Ovates carried silver apple boughs with bronze, silver, or gold bells. And in Ireland, Otherworld apples also feature prominently inEchtrae
Chonnlai which was recorded in the 8th or 9th c., but it's a much older tale. And in The Song of Wandering Aengus, Yeats made famous the lines lifted from Irish folklore, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

But the wild apple was native to the British Isles long before the Romans or Christianity reached its shores. In fact, there is evidence that wild apples grew wild in Ireland and Britain during the Neolithic era.

The word apple is embedded in many insular place-names that predate Roman occupation. Anglesey, the Isle of Apples, Avalon. Anglesey (Ynys Môn) was sometimes calledAfallach,
or rich in apples. Geoffrey of Monmouth called the island Insule
Ponorum, or the island of the apples. In Immram Brain, a síd woman gives Bran a silver branch in white bloom—a cróeb dind abaill a hEmain, or ‘a branch from the apple-tree of Emain. Emain Macha was sometimes called Emain Ablach. –The Apple in Early Irish Narrative.

When I was in the Ukraine, I was struck by how similar the word apple яблоко yablacko in Russian is to the Irish (genitive) Ablach, clearly a shared Indo-European ancestry.

And
the Celtic apple of the day would've been a quasi-domestic relative of
the wild European crabapple Malus sylvestris, aka the small forest apple,
not the ancestor of the modern apple, Malus sieversii (native to the
mountains of Turkey and Kazakhstan).

The symbol of the apple
wasn't necessarily a tradition borrowed from the Middle East. Greek
references to apples predate the Roman
cultivation, and the role of the apple is central to Bronze Age Celtic
lore. Even Homer's
Odyssey refers to apples. Then there's the apple tussle of Aphrodite, Athena and Hera to
consider. You know, like, Who's the most beautiful goddess of all, and
the sour apples of discord? Fairytale heroine Snow White chokes on an apple and falls asleep for a very long time.

The Greek word "μήλον" for apple or any kind of globular, or round fruit, and fat-bottom girls—is malon, or melon. Think generic. Sort of like
asking for a Coke and getting orange soda. In Homeric times, "μήλον"
also referred to sheep or goats. Pomaceous: anything-apple-shaped. Round. There
must've been some seriously fat goats. Sappho
likened a young bride to an ‘sweet apple’ (gluku’malon).

When does the word apple enter into the English translation of the Bible as
THE depicted forbidden fruit? Bede? (late 7th c.) Aldred? (10th c.) John
Wycliffe? (late 14th c.) King James? What was the Latin word: fructus,
or malum? (The Irish monk-scribes would've been reading the Bible bits in Greek and
Latin.)

There were
certainly native European crab apples in the British Isles since the last Ice Age, but the
problem is even thornier than that. Get this: apples, indigenous to cold northern
climates, weren't even a Levant fruit. Too dry and too hot. (They're now carefully propagated in the Golan Heights.)The so-called "apple" of the Holy Land was most likely a quince. The apple would've been
an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times. There goes the old Tree of Knowledge metaphor.

I also discovered that the word "apple" was
used as a generic term for ALL globular (foreign) fruit and some
vegetables (not berries or nuts), as late as the 17th century. Tomatoes
were called love apples, cucumbers and potatoes, earth apples. Even
oranges were referred to as apples. Because they were ROUND!

The two words for apple and evil in Latin are also a tongue-in-cheek pun: Eve ate a malum (apple—or something fat and round), and became mālum (evil). The Arabic for apple is tuffah, Hebrew is tappuach,
from the Aramaic. But it was probably a borrowing, as the so-called
apple of the Holy Land was most likely a quince. The apple would've been
an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times.Also, it's a western European
concept to associate apples with the Tree of Knowledge. (When? Probably
since the late Middle Ages. The apple is depicted in art during the
Renaissance.) So, the much maligned apples were not necessarily
considered to be the forbidden fruit during the 6th - 8th centuries.

It's a muddled idea, at best. Or perhaps it's all muddled road apples.

The modern apple, Malus pumila, related to the wild forest apple, Malus silvestris, seems
to have had a wide geographic distribution from the British Isles to China to
Central Asia, and then some, and there are no less than four other malus
species in North America. It's probably a circumpolar Ice Age
relic plant species like vaccinium.

So, if apples came from Kazakhstan, how in the bleeding blue blazes did they arrive in North America before Columbus, or, say, Lief Erickson? And don't tell me Johnny Appleseed, hero of cider makers everywhere, planted them all. He did sow the Northwest Territories with apple trees. Since he used apple seeds, gawd only knows what wild varieties sprouted since apples don't seed true to form.

In fact, crab apples are also native to the entire Northern
Hemisphere. (I had previously learned that apples were brought to the New
World by colonists, and scholars still erroneously note European apples
originally came by way of Kazakhstan, or China, along with the peach, which really messes with
the myriad apple references embedded within Medieval Celtic
mythology.)
I am fascinated by the evolution of the apple. With the streamlining of marketable apples, we're down to a handful of tasteless eating apples with names like Fuji, Pink Lady, and Gala. Our Italian neighbor, Mary Bianchi, in Forest Knolls, had cooking apples (monstrous sour things), plus a variety of eating apples including striped winesaps, Gravensteins, and also bitter cider apples.

"Hard apple cider was hugely popular in early America, and cider vinegar was an essential home ingredient." According to Oregonian heirloom apple hunter, David Benscoter, “It is estimated that of the 17,000 named apple varieties originating in North America, only around 4,000 still exist today." —Apple detective finds five more apple varieties thought to be extinct...

According to most definitions, the main difference between a crab apple and an edible, domestic apple is the size of the fruit (and the sourness). But it's more complicated than that. Farmers and cider-makers traditionally waited for the bitter fruit laden with tannin to be kissed and sweetened by the first frost before harvest (similar to bletting).

The familiar edible apples did not grow in North America before the arrival of European settlers. Old World apple trees became established in the New World from the trees and seeds that Dutch and English emigrants brought from Europe. As legend has it, Johnny Appleseed profoundly influenced the spread of apples in North America by sowing them everywhere he traveled, but he was just one of many pioneers who planted apple seeds in the new territories. The original cultivated apple trees also became established naturally through seeds dispersed by birds and mammals. Old World Apples. [For more on Old World apple species, see also "Old-Time Apples," THE WORLD & I, October 1989, p. 388]

Before European apples were introduced to the New World,crab apples were native to North America. Although less familiar than commercial apples, these native American species still grow in the wild. In North America, there's Malus ioensis, or prairie crabapple (ioensis refers to Iowa). The most common variety, Malus ioensis var. ioensis, is native to the prairies of the upper Mississippi Valley. Another variety, Malus ioensis var. texana, or the Texas crabapple, is native to a tiny region of central Texas. There's even a Southern crabapple, Malus angustifolia. Then there's Malus fusca, native to western North America from Alaska, with a range from British Columbia, to northwestern California. Flowers are white or pale pink.

According to a blogpost, Native American Apple, plant taxonomists may quibble over the number of apples native to North America, but most agree that there are four major species. The three eastern species are quite similar to each other. But the lone western species is a bird of a different feather. The western species shares similarities with wild apples native to China, while the three eastern species seem to have Middle East connections—thought to have split off early in the evolution of the genus Malus.

There are an estimated 25-47 different species of Malus worldwide. This
number fluctuates greatly due to the ease in which species of Malus are
able to hybridize with each other, making the process of differentiation
between the species very difficult. Of this number, only four species
are native to North America. These species are Malus fusca, Malus
coronaria, Malus angustifolia and Malus ioensis.Crab Apple Trees Native to North America.

In northern California, there was a wild crab apple tree in the gulch across the way from us where my grandmother used to gather the apples after the first frost. I loved eating them. I never considered it a native species. The diminutive apples were dense, with golden yellow pulp, sweet, but with a bitter astringent afterbite. It was probably a Pacific crab apple or Oregon crab apple. One fall, our new neighbor, in an attempt to tame the land, viciously hacked it down with a chainsaw, and we mourned its loss.

Now, decades later, after I learned that the old crab apple tree wasn't an escapee from some farmer's orchard by way of pooping birds, but a native species, I doubly mourn its loss.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Feeling more than a little blue today, so I drew yet another view of Elephant, or Black Mountain....it kept me in the present tense. This view is from a hike I took with my cousin on Olema Ridge, to the old McIsaac Ranch, Point Reyes. We went to see the extent of the fire damage on Mt Barnabe, and this was behind my left shoulder—I actually gasped. It took me by surprise to see it so close, and from this angle. So sensual, so stark. From a photo I took in September—before the relationship shit began hitting the fan.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Folklore: When you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish.Genre: superstition, sympathetic magic; plant husbandry: Appalachia, possibly British origins.Bonus folklore: family history, a moniker, and a diamond ringInformant: Donna Champion, female, 64 English/Spanish-speaking Guamanian-Chamorro, Guatemalan, Spanish, French/Norman Irish-American ESL instructor, Sonoma County, CADec. 9, 2018Collected in Cotati, CA (in a car on Hwy 116) I collected a new bit of folklore that arrived by way of Guam, of all places. It probably arrived by way of Texas, possibly originally from Kentucky, or even the British Isles, ca. 1910. The saying was a favorite of Donna Champion's grandfather, Chester Carl, aka "CC," or “Pinky” Butler, who passed it onto his Guamanian daughter, Clara Mae Butler. Donna and I were driving down Highway 116, when an overladen hay truck was approaching us, coming the other way. She said, Quick! Make a wish. So I did. Then she told me the superstition that her mother, Pinky’s daughter, Clara Mae Butler Champion, who was born on Guam, taught her. Donna said, "Whenever we passed a hay truck, my mother would say: when you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish. It didn't have to be a truck." She also said, "You need to keep the wish to yourself."I got a few bits of folklore for the price of one, from how the Coca-Cola franchise arrived on Guam, to how Pinky got his Guamanian moniker. Chester Carl, aka C.C. (b. In Sunset, TX, ca., 1884), was a redhead of Norman-Irish descent (by way of Illinois, and W. Virginia); his father, James Berry Butler, a newspaper editor from Illinois, took to drink after Chester’s mother, Melissa Belle Payne, a Baptist who hailed from Rockwell Texas, died in childbirth when he was eight years old). Living with his three brothers at the relatives didn't pan out, and after Chester finished eighth grade, he ran away from his mother’s extended family. When he was 14, he went to seek his fortune out west. He arrived San Francisco, where he was employed to sell fruits vegetables in a pushcart on Nob Hill. His employer took him in and gave him room and board. When Chester was 18 (ca. 1902), he joined the Navy, and served aboard the USS Pensacola. That's how he wound up on Guam.

Chester "Pinky" Butler of the USS Pensacola, showing off his tats

A fair-freckled, blue-eyed redhead, Chester's fair complexion didn’t fare too well on Guam, he was always sunburned—hence the moniker "Pinky." With the help of his greengrocer savings, which he had converted into a diamond ring he kept hidden in his pillow, he used the ring as collateral, and with that, made a family fortune. Pinky was industrious, he brought a Coke franchise, and seltzer water machines to Guam, and sold American made goods to the Pacific islands. That enterprise became a thriving chain of businesses, Butler's Inc. That grubstake ring became an engagement ring for the 17-year-old Ignacia Bordallo, who was from the largeKotlaChamorro clan. They were married on the 8th of January, 1915, in Agat, Guam. They had six children. He was taken a prisoner of war Dec. 8, 1941, and held in Kobe, Japan for the duration of the war. His health was broken. He died on Valentine's Day, 1952, in Oakland, CA. Donna's eldest sister, Connie still has that diamond ring.The first time my friend Donna remembered hearing the saying, When you pass a load of moving hay, make a wish, was in the early 1960s, was when she was a child. Donna learned it from her mother, Clara Mae (Pinky’s daughter), in Sebastopol, CA.

What makes this bit of folklore interesting to me is that there were no hay trucks or haywains on Guam, and yet the saying survived three generations. Donna's brother Greg, born in 1952, didn't recall the hay saying, but he did add that his maternal great-great-grandfather, from Spain, raised cattle on Guam.Apparently the second part of the hay-wish formula was that you couldn’t look back at the passing vehicle either, a condition which my friend said she never learned. I found another account online where you had to lick your thumbs, and snap your fingers/slap your thigh, too. (see my notes below.)

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Elephant Mountain in fog, colored pencil. Still learning the blending and layering process. Yes, I’m working in a series, I took lots of photos in September, and am using them as models as a backlog. so I’ll keep using them until I’ve figured it out. Electronically enhanced plein air painting—er, drawing. I prefer to paint, but I don’t have my art supplies. Quickie sketch below was done after the above drawing. I was explaining the concept of landscape layers and triangular shapes to a very young artist.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Ah, Julia, named after a city of vines,
your knitted cap, a badge of the troubadour,
artist, wordsmith, I never knew you well,
but the street corners of Telegraph rose up
to greet you like feral cats weaving
invisible shackles with their thin bodies,
saying the poet is come.
The Bubblelady is come with her magic wand,
welcome words feeding the pigeons at dawn.
The fog weeps and mourns in tendrils
for the passing of the daughter of the street,
the poet-chronicler of alleyways and corners.
Yes, the street mourns for you,
it will miss the caresses of your jade eye
as you turned the suffering of those
sleeping in doorways into a cloak
of humanity and hope. Perhaps
someone will place a bronze star,
or a bench with a bigger-than-life sculpture
of you hawking your books to unsuspecting tourists
in front of Moe’s Books for you,
Poet Laureate of the streets.

I launched a new blog of very old work, The Russian River Writers’ Guild poetry and prose reading series, of which I was part of from 1979 to the mid-1990s. It's where I first began my career as a poet, my teething ring, then my training bra, and later, my world stage. I've pulled blog posts and snippets from this blog and reposted them (revised and expanded snippets) there, as they were lost here, they were too hard to find, too spread out. The storyline was impossible to follow. Now, there's a partial timeline of the poets who've read for the series from 1976 to the late 1990s.

The new blog, with its flyers, and Obligatory Hug, replete with poems, serves as a timeline of that era. I will eventually add photos as well, but just adding the flyers alone has been a monumental task. I am indebted to Donna Champion, keeper of the RRWG archives. There are a few holes, but the flyers paint a complete picture of the series and the poets who read for us. And you, Dear Reader, should you have any memorabilia, we would be ever so grateful.

T'was the earliest of daze, the poets gaze....

What to do with all those old literary archives—why, scan them, of course. Welcome to our latest blog, the archives of the North Bay Area's longest running poetry series, the Russian River Writers' Guild, founded in 1972, or 73, depending upon your source. I will be cannibalizing posts from my blog, Literrata to fit this blog. So this project is very much in medias res... please bear with me while I massage all the bits and pieces together to make a timeline of sorts. If you were a reader, please reveal yourselves, share your stories, and memorabilia. Leave poems, and comments. So many (in)famous writers. So many crazy nights.This stuff needs to be documented, and I'm counting on you to remember, O collective hive mind. But first, a little backstory:

Since the early '70's, both famous and infamous poets across the nation have shared the podium with local poets at the Russian River Writers' Guild poetry and prose reading series. Literally, hundreds of poets—from nationally recognized names such as McArthur prize recipient Robert Hass; Robert Bly whose translations of Rilke were published by Calliopea Press; and 95-year-old Meridel LeSueur, a McCarthy era blacklisted writer rediscovered in the 70's by the women's movement—to the real unknowns who have just discovered the power of the written word.

Guild coordinators Lee Perron and Maureen Hurley said the heyday of the series (1979 to '82) was when novelist Margie Summerfield offered them a free space with a stage, lighting and sophisticated sound system at Garbo's Cabaret & Bar in Guernewood Park. Many customers who came in for a drink were startled at first, but soon took to poetry like ducks to water. The Paper: RUSSIAN RIVER WRITERS' GUILD POETRY AND PROSE SERIES; AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (1/6/88)

The Sunday evening poetry series, called Poetry, for lack of a better handle, began in 1973, or 73, depending upon whom you talked to. The ad hoc poetry group met in people's homes, and cafes like West of the Laguna, Brothers, and Odd Fellows Junction.

One former co-founder, Andrei Codrescu, Rumanian poet, and poetry correspondent for NPR's weekly series, All Things Considered, dubbed his fellow poetry conspirator, Pat Nolan, a leader of the "California School of Writing" according to Nolan's wife, Gail King, who was also a coordinator. Other coordinators included Ellen Appel, Gordon Carrega, Gil Helmick, and Hunce Voelker.

The nameless poetry series, a showcase for the 1970s new school of writing, and local talent, featured writers including Pat Nolan, Gail King, Jeffrey Miller, Diane diPrima, Steve Petty, Richard Welin, Gerrye Payne, Marianne Ware, and Donna Champion.

Newcomer, Donna Champion, who had read for the series in 1976, was expertly reeled in by Marianne Ware who was after new blood when Andrei Codrescu fled to New Orleans. Donna coined the Guild's moniker when she needed a title for her community project at Sonoma State University in 1978. And the name, the Russian River Writers' Guild, shortened to RRWG, which stuck, apostrophe and all.

RRWG guild co-founder and "Jewish mother", Marianne Ware, greeted each reader with a big hug, which was dubbed by coordinator Jim Montrose as the "obligatory hug" which became the name of the Guild's monthly newsletter of upcoming poetic events, prose, and poetry of featured readers––circa 1980.Jim died in 1984, so there are several posts of the posthumous book we edited, Tracks in the Widest Orbit. We also submitted it as his MA thesis at Sonoma State University (he was in my MA class there), which was awarded in May of 1985.

Burnout was a constant problem as most of the former coordinators had either dropped out, or moved on. Over the years, many Sonoma County poets stepped up to help carry the mantle that Marianne Ware, and Donna Champion, who were the last ones of the original group left upholding the series in 1979. Maureen Hurley, Lee Perron, Jim Montrose, Joe Pahls, Mark Clagett, Craig Taylor, Bonnie Olsen, Claire Josephine, Glenn Ingersoll, Jim McCrary, David Bromige, Steve Tills, Jayne McPherson....(don’t take offense if we didn’t list you, we're adding names as we go.)

This list is just the beginning—we'll be fluffing up the history and developing the timeline in the near future. And it will be a challenge to name all the venues that hosted the series up and down the Russian River, to Sebastopol, and Santa Rosa—we read in tree stumps, living rooms, pizza parlours, bars and niteclubs, cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, and senior centers—any place that would have us.

Venues: West of the Laguna?, Brothers, aka Odd Fellows Junction, Country Grounds, Garbo's Cabaret, Stumptown Annie's, Fife's Resort, several other venues before we moved off the river. Luther Burbank Activities Center, Copperfield's, and another small market venue in Sebastopol (plus one-off events at the Sebastopol Veteran's Hall, the Episcopal Church in Guerneville, the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Santa Rosa, Sonoma State University), Aroma Roasters, Franklin Street Clubhouse, Higher Grounds, Mudd's, in Santa Rosa; Johnny Otis Niteclub in Sebastopol... (I need help here).

I gave 20 years of my life to promoting poets and producing poetry readings in Sonoma County. I was an open mike poet, was elevated to featured reader, then emcee, then booker, grantwriter, photographer, and eventually Executive Director. In other words, I was one of the the last ones standing. Like the phoenix, the series died, and was reborn again and again.... until it died for good in the mid-1990s. We're not even sure when poetry died in Sonoma County. But it did. We dissolved our 501c3 non-profit status in January of 2001. Long live the Russian River Writers' Guild. This is a swansong and requiem all in one.

You'd think we would've gotten lots of kudos and reciprocal readings, but, it was a largely thankless job. Unpaid, of course. There's no money in poetry, or herding cats. The biggest insult, was when an anthology was produced by the Russian River Women Writers, an offshoot of the guild, and my work wasn't included, out of spite because of a petty RRWG booking SNAFU where I calligraphed Margaret Ellingson's name smaller in order to fit it on the flyer (no typesetting in those days). When the guild made another collective anthology edited by Jayne McPherson, A Stone's Throw, the oversight was rectified, but by then, I was spun and done with the RRWG.

But these poets, whether good, bad, or indifferent—were my teachers and mentors. And for that, I am grateful.—Maureen Hurley 12/3/2018

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Before/after Christo. But it’s really all about the sky. Learning as I go. Apparently you can blend wax pencils with a tortillon, a clear wax pencil, or paint thinner. I accidentally discovered that blendability here by layering colors. I’m using my old stabillo pencil to block out the hills and shadow. I love its waxiness—but it’s also water soluble. May make for instability later. Not happy with the foreground, it looks unfinished, so I may try using thinner and then layering it—if the paper will hold. This is why you’re supposed to use good paper....

Same
walk, same place. A combo of two photos! Seeking composition and color
on an otherwise dreecht and dreary day. I didn’t investigate the other
side of the tree, so I don’t know if it bent over, or if it lost its top
long ago. Not sure if I like this one, and I tweaked my back making it,
sitting too long in one place, so I’m not sure if I’m up for
another....waiting for Advil to do its magic.

Friday, November 30, 2018

My first real outing
using colored wax pencils. Learning as I go. Not having the right paper
may prove a challenge. It’s
all about that bend in the road leading you ever on. Following the
shores of the old laguna bed—reduced to that line of trees in the
distance. Soon, winter floods will restore some of the memory of that
ancient lakebed.

I
need a dry place to store a closet’s worth of art supplies—mostly for
teaching—plus a few boxes of books would be grand. I miss not having my
art supplies nearby—even if I rarely use them.

While waiting to present a poetry workshop, I
chanced upon an arts workshop at the Jewish elder home and I painted the
morning away. Five visions of Black Mountain. This is the only way I
know how to heal after tragedy. Art has always been my first language.
Tempera, or cheap gouache on cardboard. Yes, cardboard. I'd run out of painting surfaces, this was supposed to be my painting palette.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

The early Medieval era, when the Irish epics were first recorded, wasn’t
quite the gastronomic desert we imagine it today. Sorrel sauce, and sour verjuice was used to flavor meats, as were rose hips, sloe plums, apples, pears, huckleberries, bog berries (a type of cranberry), and juniper berries; coriander seeds were used, as well as caraway, fennel, and mustard seeds; lots of pot herbs were used, such as young tart pine needles, heather, woodruff, and many types of mint—also mushrooms, garlic and onions. Rose petals were a popular dessert flavoring too.

Caraway seeds and greens were used, both as a spice and a pot herb. Any Roman potherb or spice that was introduced and easily grown in Britain would also have been readily available. Main spices used during the British Middle Ages were introduced during the Crusades, but some were introduced to Britain by the Romans. Roman cooks traditionally used aromatic herbs (dill, coriander, cumin, laurel, lovage, rue, anise, mint, mustard, oregano, savory, myrtle...). I would imagine rosemary was also used. Spices included pepper, silphium or laser, saffron, turmeric, cardamom, ginger and nard. Cinnamon was considered a medicine. I imagine clove was also a medicine, as was sugar!

I once hosted a medieval Celtic feast for my final project at UC
Berkeley, using traditional ingredients. Toasting the oats for
shortbread produced a strong vanillan flavor, as would using fresh pine
needles, etc. We discovered that leached ashes were also used as leavening agent, when
eggs weren’t available. Kind of a primitive baking soda, or powder. (See pearl ash, or potash—there's a reason why it's called potash!)

The medieval Irish roasted their oatmeal, and then
flattened the hard grains in a saddle quern (think rolled oats) before
making their famous griddle cakes. Roasting the oatmeal imparted a
strong vanillan flavor. Just because we think of vanilla as a modern
flavor, it doesn’t mean the compound itself didn’t exist in other
foodstuffs. Epic hero Cú Chullain roasted
his oatmeal on an iron griddle for his oatcakes before going into
battle. Medieval Britons primarily used rose water, etc., and later
saffron, as a custard flavoring.

In
Germany and Scandinavia, during the end of the Middle Ages, powdered
deer antler was also used as a leavening agent (ammonium carbonate) for
hard cookies such as Springerle, Liebkuchen, and Hartshorn. (Leavening could also be made by distilling hair or decomposed urine.) Apparently the ammonia odor as they were cooking was memorable. Cookies as strong medicine....

Contrary to popular belief, Essex was not the original
place where saffron was cultivated. Greece, maybe. It comes from the
Middle East, especially Iran. Saffron is a Persian word. Saffron was the
costliest of all medieval spices, more costly than sugar. The English
word "saffron" probably stems from the 12th-century Old French term
safran, from the Latin—safranum, from the Arabic za'farān, from the
Persian word zarparan meaning "flower with golden petals".

Saffron
as a color is also mentioned in medieval Ireland as a dyestuff, but
other plants were also used to achieve that color dye, including gorse
and brassica. The color itself, regardless of its plant origin, was
called saffron, which is a well-attested classical reference. It doesn’t
refer to the edible crocus sativus, as the edible crocus is not native
to Britain. And it sounds like crocus wasn’t introduced until ca. 1560, when
the bulb first appeared in the Netherlands. It didn’t become a common
garden plant in Northern Europe until ca. the 1620s.

Speaking of medicine, you can get a fair indication of spices used during the Middle Ages by looking at the medicinal cures from the Middle Ages...Rosa Goidelica.
(now I can't find a reference to it....) One of my favorite recipes for
a toothache, eat a cinnamon-infused chicken eaten at the crossroads.
Apparently saffron rice was another medicinal favorite. Where did they
get the rice from? That sort of dates it, timewise, along with
noodles—the age of Marco Polo.

Any spice popular in Rome would’ve made its way into the cooking pots of
Britain. The Greeks and Romans were aware of cardamon (a member of
the ginger family) and used it as a perfume, and it was well known in
Egypt and the Middle East. The Indian spice could’ve been
reintroduced by way of the Vikings several centuries after the Romans
pulled out of Britain.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Sunday is Veteran's Day, called Armistice, or Remembrance Day in the U.K. This year is the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, which was called "The War to End All Wars". It didn't take. Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian doctor serving on the Western Front, wrote In Flanders Fields after the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915, for a close friend who died in battle. He wrote the poem, graveside, after conducting his friend's burial service. McCrae caught pneumonia in January, 1918, and died two weeks later. His poem, In Flanders Fields has become a leit-motif of the War, and is recited each year at Remembrance Day ceremonies around the world.

Siegfried Sassoon's poem, Suicide in the Trenches, was composed in response to his witnessing the atrocities of WWI, on the Western Front, and Sassoon, a much decorated soldier, became a focal point for dissent when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his Soldier's Declaration of 1917. Instead of idealizing war, he was the first poet who spoke of the atrocities he had witnessed first hand at the Front, in vivid detail—which landed him in a military psychiatric hospital where he met fellow soldier and poet Wilfred Owen, who ironically was killed in 1918, one week before Armistice.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Moving a hundred years forward to time present, a poem of UK poet laureate (2009-2019) Carol Ann Duffy, The Wound in Time, caught my attention. Even though few surviving members of WWI are still with us, and ditto that for WWII, we are all still wounded by war. Her second poem as Poet Laureate, Last Post, was commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last two British soldiers to fight in World War I, is worth a look.

Last Post makes explicit references to Wilfred Owen's poem from the First World War Dulce et Decorum Est. It imagines what would happen if time ran backwards and those killed in the war came back to life; their lives would still be full of possibilities and filled with "love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food." Wiki,

Itself, which is a line borrowed from the Roman poet Horace– Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ("It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"). Memory, remembrance, in memoriam, these notions have fed a self-fueled war machine since Classical times.

Duffy is a Scottish poet/playwright of Irish parentage, who was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow's version of Hell's Kitchen, wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

When she was 16, she met Adrian Henri, one of the Liverpool poets, and decided she wanted to be with him; she then lived with him until 1982. "He gave me confidence," she said, "he was great. It was all poetry, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful." Wiki

I guess Adrian was successful, as he seemed to put Carol Ann off men for good, but I can attest that he was a charismatic pied piper, having met him at Poetry International in Rotterdam in the mid 1990s. Adrian and I shared a common bond in that we both worked in the schools teaching kids poetry. I gave him an armful of student anthologies. Perhaps some of Adrian's work rubbed off. In 2011 Duffy spearheaded a poetry competition for school children, dubbed Anthologise.

Many assume that, Scottish-Australian poet-songwriter Eric Bogle's No Man's Land is a reference to the Battle of the Somme, which celebrated its centenary in 2016, but Eric, a great storyteller who immigrated to Australia, penned this song in response to sectarian violence in Ireland. I first met Eric in Sebastopol for the Celtic Festival, ca 2000. At the time, he said that he wrote it during the Vietnam War, but it wasn't even about WWI. Bogle gave the fictitious dead soldier an Irish name to counter the anti-Irish sentiment in Britain during the 1970s. In an Irish News interview, in 2106, Eric said:

"I’ve often said that there never was one actual soldier called Willie McBride that I wrote about. I didn’t sit by the grave of a Willie McBride to write the song, that would be bulls**t. But I wanted to remind people that a lot of Irish lads had died fighting for king and country during WWI as well because when I wrote it in 1975, the IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland was in full swing and there was a lot of anti-Irish feeling about and I just thought, ‘Well, here’s a wee subtle dig at the haters. “It was so subtle that most people missed it, of course,” he laughs, “but I don’t like to harangue or shove a point down people’s throats in my songs."

Eric often follows No Man's Landup with And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, (1971) a reference to Gallipoli, and the futility of war. In 2015, Eric played a concert at the site of the slaughter at Gallipoli, something he had previously refused to do because “the thought of singing for all those ghosts has always intimidated me.”

THE WOUND IN TIME
Poem on the centenary of Armistice Day 2018
Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.

NO MAN'S LAND
aka The Green Fields of France, or Young Willie McBride
Eric Bogle (1944-)

Well how do you do young Willie McBride?
do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside
and rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
I've been walkin' all day and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
when you joined the great fallen of 1916.
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Willie McBride was it slow and obscene?

CHORUS
Did they beat the drum slowly,
did they play the fife lowly,
did they sound the death march
as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus,
did the pipes play the "Flowers of the Forest"

And the beautiful wife or the sweetheart for life
in some faithful heart are you forever enshrined
and although you died back in 1916
in that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
enshrined forever behind a glass pane
in an ould photograph torn tattered and stained,
fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?
CHORUS

Now the sun shines down on the green fields of France
a warm summer wind makes the red poppies dance
The trenches have vanished all under the plows,
there's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land,
the countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
for man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
to a whole generation that was butchered and damned.
CHORUS

Now Willie McBride I can't help wonder why
Do those who lie here do they know why they died
Did they really believe when they answered the call
did they really believe that this war would end wars
Forever this song of suffering and shame
the killing, the dying, was all done in vain
for young Willie McBride it's all happened again,
and again, and again, and again and again.